Comment on Tattoo Ink Moves Through the Body, Killing Immune Cells and Weakening Vaccine Response
olafurp@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoSure, the study would be best if we did a randomised double blind study on a sample of 100 people that all are going to get a tattoo anyway but that doesn’t make the mouse study irrelevant.
Mice and humans, although very different in appearance have biomechanics that are very similar. For every human study you could make a 20 mouse studies with the same funding so you could do a lot more exploration.
This study found something, notably that ink in the blood affected the immune system. This just means that future studies are needed like injecting people with tattoo ink and blood samples diagnosis after tattoo to see how much ink is in the blood. If confirmed this will push tattoo ink manufacturers to develop a new ink that eliminates the effect and we can all enjoy safer more effective tattooing.
This study is not flawed, it’s pushing human knowledge forward like it always does.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
It’s the size of the animal that’s important here. I’m aware that mice can sometimes have useful biomechanical similarities to humans, but this is the wrong animal to use in this case. Pigs would have been much much better.
Tattooing is a delicate operation that requires precision, even using different pressures between male and female human skin, and that does not scale well at all for an animal that is 100x smaller than a human.